Interview: West's manipulation of narrative "extraordinary dangerous" -- U.S. scholar

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts, a U.S. scholar has said.

"The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion," Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, told Xinhua in a recent written interview.

While the core U.S. idea is that China and Russia are "implacable foes" attempting to "erode American security and prosperity," the irony is that the United States has been in at least 15 overseas wars of its choice since 1980, with military bases in 85 countries, said Sachs, also president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development.

"There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world's dominant power: the United States. It is past time that the United States recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony," he said.

Noting that a generation earlier, the U.S. administration of George W. Bush sold the public the idea that America's greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, Sachs said that it was the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that "had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America's wars."

Misinformation campaigns were also launched by the West in incidents including Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Russia's military assistance to Syria beginning in 2015, and the recent Russia-Ukraine conflict, said the U.S. scholar.

"At the core of all of this is the U.S. attempt to remain the world's hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia," said Sachs. "It is a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea."